Web servers are optimized to serve web pages fast. However there is a cost for this optimization; the truth is that web servers are optimized to serve pages that are requested a lot fast and those that are less requested much slower.
Web servers tend to cache frequently used pages in memory, and this makes it faster to serve them once they are requested. But when a website is not used then it is unloaded from memory and on request it has to be loaded again. This obviously means that your client could potentially end up waiting for a website to load. Having a monitor ping the website means the server keeps the website in memory, since the web server is fooled that your website is being used. Thus your visitors will visit a website which is loaded in the server’s memory thus served faster.
The majority of today’s websites are not written in plain HTML syntax but in some server side scripting like ASP.NET and PHP. In such cases it’s not just matter of the web server loading the website but it also needs to be compiled before being served. When a visitor visits the website, it’s not just a matter of loading but also compilation which can take a good number of seconds.
So take our suggestion, start monitoring your websites with Netumo. Netumo pings your website and makes you aware if something is wrong, while at the same time the website is faster and kept alive in the server’s memory.